US military guns are lost, stolen, end up in criminal hands

Pulling a pistol from his waistband, the young man spun his human shield toward police.

Don’t do it, a pursuing officer implored. The man released the bystander and tossed the gun, which skittered across the city street.

Police who picked up the 9mm Beretta semi-automatic would soon learn it had a rap sheet of its own. Bullet strike marks tied it to four shootings, all of them in Albany, New York.

And there was something else. The pistol was U.S. Army property, a weapon of war intended for use against America’s enemies, not on its streets.

The Army couldn’t say how its Beretta M9 got to New York’s capital. Until the June 2018 police chase, it didn’t even realize someone had stolen the gun. Inventory records said M9 was safely within Fort Bragg, North Carolina -- 600 miles away.

“It’s incredibly alarming,” said Albany District Attorney P. David Soares. “It raises the other question as to what else is seeping into a community that could pose a clear and present danger.”

The armed services and Pentagon are not eager for the public to know the answers.

In the first public accounting of its kind in decades, an Associated Press investigation has found that at least 1,900 US military firearms were lost or stolen during the 2010s, with some resurfacing in violent crimes. AP’s total is a certain undercount of a problem the Pentagon and armed services have downplayed.

Government records covering the Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force show pistols, machine guns, grenades and fully automatic assault rifles vanished from armories, supply warehouses, Navy warships, firing ranges, trains and elsewhere. Security lapses included unlocked doors, sleeping guards, surveillance cameras that didn’t record, weapons left unsecured, break-ins and other losses that have not been publicly reported.

Cases reflected the military’s global footprint, touching large installations coast to coast, as well as bases overseas. In Afghanistan, someone cut the padlock on an Army container and stole 65 Beretta M9s; the theft that went undetected at least two weeks, when empty pistol boxes were discovered in the compound.

Elite units are not immune. A former member of Marines special forces was busted with two stolen guns. A Navy Seal lost his pistol in a bar fight in Jordan.

The Pentagon used to share regular updates about missing weapons with Congress, but when that stopped accountability slipped. None of the armed services nor the Office of the Secretary of Defense could readily tell AP how many weapons are lost or stolen. So the AP built its own database, using extensive federal Freedom of Information Act requests to review hundreds of military criminal case files or property loss reports.

Sometimes, weapons disappear without a paper trail. Military investigators regularly close cases without recovering the firearms or finding the person responsible because shoddy records lead to dead-ends.

One active threat is the insiders responsible for securing weapons. Often low-paid, they know how to exploit weak points within armories or the military’s enormous supply chains.

“It’s about the money, right?” Brig. Gen. Duane Miller, the Army’s No. 2 law enforcement official, said in an interview.

Theft or loss happens more than the Army wanted the public to know. Miller significantly downplayed the extent to which weapons disappear, citing records that report only a few hundred missing rifles and handguns -- not the 1,300 his office tallied in an internal Army analysis that AP obtained.

MILLER RESPONSE TO EXPLAIN HIS DENIAL HERE

The Army consistently obscured information on a subject with the potential to embarrass. A former insider described how the Army blocked the release of details on missing guns when AP opened this investigation a decade ago.

Top officials within the Army, Marines and Secretary of Defense’s office said that weapon accountability is a high priority -- and there is no doubt that a missing weapon causes a large-scale response to recover it. The officials also said missing weapons are not a widespread problem and noted that the numbers are a tiny fraction of the military’s stockpile.

COULD USE CANCIDE TRESCH QUOTE HERE? , Tresch, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Secretary of Defense

In the absence of regular reporting, the office is responsible for informing Congress of any “significant” incidents. The office has made no notifications since at least 2018, Tresch said. That period includes the Albany shootings.

While AP’s study period was 2010-2019, incidents persist.

In May, an Army trainee fled Fort Jackson in South Carolina with an M4 rifle and hijacked a school bus full of children, pointing his assault weapon at the driver before eventually letting everyone go. In March, an M4 rifle disappeared during District of Columbia National Guard training.

Last October, police in San Diego were startled to find a military grenade launcher on the front seat of a car they pulled over for expired license plates. After publicizing the arrest, police got a call from Camp Pendleton, the sprawling Marine Corps base up the Pacific coast.

The Marines wanted to know if the grenade launcher was one they couldn’t find. They read off a serial number. It wasn’t a match.

The grenade launcher’s origins remain a mystery.

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CRIME GUNS

Military guns have been stolen by felons, sold to street gangs, used in violent crimes and recovered by police.

The AP identified eight instances in which five different stolen military firearms were used in a civilian shooting or other violent crime, and others in which felons were caught possessing weapons. These are certain undercounts attributable to federal restrictions on sharing firearms information.

The Pentagon does not keep close tabs on such cases. The closest AP could find to an independent tally was from the FBI, whose Criminal Justice Information Services said 22 guns with a military make were used in the commission of a felony in the 2010s.

That’s why Albany police were searching for 21-year-old Alvin Damon in June 2018 -- they placed him at a shooting which involved the Beretta M9, a workhorse weapon for the military that is similar to its civilian cousin.

Surveillance video showed another man firing the gun four times at a group of people off camera, taking cover behind a building between shots. Two men walking with him scattered, one dropping his hat in the middle of the street. No one was injured.

Two months later, Detective Daniel Seeber spotted Damon on a stoop near the Prince Deli corner store. Damon took off running and, not far into the chase, grabbed a man who had just emerged from the deli with juice and a bag of chips.

After Seeber defused the standoff and police collected the pistol, they contacted the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to trace its story. The ATF contacted Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, and a review of Army inventory systems showed the M9 had been listed as “in-transit” between two Fort Bragg units as of April 2016.

Five years after the Beretta M9 pistol vanished, the Army doesn’t know who stole it.

The case wasn’t the first in which police recovered a stolen service pistol before troops at Fort Bragg realized it was missing. AP found a second instance, involving a pistol that was among 22 M9s someone stole after breaking into an arms room.

Military police didn’t learn of the theft until 2010. By then, one of the M9s was sitting in an evidence room in the Hoke County Sheriff’s Department -- picked up in a backyard not far from Bragg. Another was seized in Durham, a long hour’s drive north of Bragg, after it was used in a parking lot shooting.

A few years later, a third of the 22 guns returned to Bragg in an unusual way. A civilian driving to work on base was randomly searched. One of the stolen guns was in his car -- he claimed that someone he gave a ride left it.

Another steady North Carolina source of weapons has been Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune. Detectives in Baltimore surveilling cocaine sales arrested four people and found a Beretta M9 stolen from a Lejeune armory. Investigators found in the 2011 case that inventory and security procedures were rarely followed. Three guns were stolen; no one was charged.

Deputies in South Carolina were called in 2017 after a man started wildly shooting an M9 pistol into the air during an argument with his girlfriend. The boyfriend, a convicted felon, then started shooting toward a neighbor’s house. The pistol came from a National Guard armory that a thief entered through an unlocked door, hauling off six fully automatic weapons, a grenade launcher and five M9s.

Authorities in central California are still finding fully automatic AK-74 rifles that were among 26 stolen from Fort Irwin a decade ago. Military police officers stole the guns from the Army base, selling some to a street gang.

Nine of the AKs have not been recovered.

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INSIDER THREAT

The people with easiest access to guns are those who handle and secure them.

In the Army, that’s often junior soldiers assigned to armories or arms rooms, according to Col. Kenneth Williams, director of supply under Army’s G-4 Logistics branch.

“This is a young guy or gal,” Williams said. “This is a person normally on their first tour of duty. So you can see that we put great responsibility on our soldiers immediately when they come in.”

Armorers have access both to firearms and the spare rifle and handgun parts kept for repairs, including upper receivers, lower receivers and trigger assemblies.

“We’ve seen issues like that in the past where an armorer might build an M16” fully automatic assault rifle from military parts,” said Mark Ridley, a former deputy director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. “You have to be really concerned with certain armorers and how they build small arms and small weapons.”

In 2014, NCIS began investigating the theft of weapons parts from Special Boat Team Twelve, a Navy unit based in Coronado, California. A weapons officer couldn’t find four M4 lower receiver trigger assemblies that could make a civilian AR-15 fully automatic. An armory inventory manager was manipulating electronic records by moving items or claiming they had been transferred. The parts were never recovered and the case was closed after federal prosecutors declined it.

Armorers are supposed to check weapons every day and, more broadly, weapons accountability is part of military routine. Sight counts, which involve a visual total of weapons on hand, are drilled into troops whether they are in the field, on patrol or in the arms room.

When they are stolen, weapons enter the public three main ways: direct sales from thieves to buyers, through pawn shops and surplus stores, or online.

Investigators have found sensitive and restricted military weapons or parts on sites including eBay and armslist.com. Both said they closely police for stolen military gear.

At Fort Campbell, Kentucky, soldiers got involved in a scheme to steal machine gun parts and other items that ended up with buyers in Russia, China, Mexico and elsewhere.

Authorities estimated a civilian named John Roberts had illegal sales topping $600,000. He was found with a warehouse of stolen items.

Often though, once a weapon is lost or stolen, recovering it can prove hard.

When an M203 grenade launcher couldn’t be found during a 2019 inventory at a Marine Corps supply base in Albany, Georgia, investigators sought surveillance camera footage. It didn’t exist -- the warehouse manager said the system had no playback capability.

An analysis of 45 firearms-only investigations in the Navy and Marines found that in 55% of cases, no suspect could be found and weapons remained missing. In those unresolved cases, investigators found records were destroyed or falsified, armory inventories weren’t done for weeks or months, and arms rooms lacked basic security.

“Gun-decking” is Navy slang for faking work. In the case of the USS Comstock, gun-decking led to the disappearance of three pistols.

Investigators found numerous security lapses in the 2012 case. One sailor had been seen sleeping in the armory, an unsecured pistol next to the door. The missing pistols weren’t properly logged in the ship’s inventory when they were received several days before. Investigators couldn’t pinpoint what day the pistols disappeared because sailors gun-decked inventory reports by not doing actual counts.

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ROOM FOR DISCREPANCY

Military officials didn’t want to talk about how many guns they have, much less how many are missing.

AP learned that the Army, the largest of the armed services, is responsible for about 3.1 million firearms. Across all four branches, the US military has about 4.5 million firearms, according to the nonprofit organization Small Arms Survey.

AP sought records on missing guns from all four services, including criminal case files, property loss forms and data from registries of small arms.

The Marines and Navy were able to produce basic data covering the 2010s.

The Navy said 251 firearms were reported lost or stolen. In addition, 70 firearms previously considered missing were recovered.

The Marines reported ### firearms as lost or stolen. Later, ### of these firearms were recovered.

The Air Force and Army could not answer simple questions about missing weapons.

The Air Force would not provide a total number or any breakdowns, saying AP would have to wait for a formal response under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Army sought to suppress information on weapons loss and gave misleading numbers that contradict internal memos.

The AP began asking Army for details on missing weapons in 2011, a year later filing a records request for guns listed as missing, lost, stolen or recovered in the Department of Defense Small Arms and Light Weapons Registry. Charles Royal, the former Army employee who was in charge of the registry, said he prepared records but higher ups blocked their release in 2013.

“You’re dealing with millions of weapons,” Royal said in a recent interview. “But we’re supposed to have 100 percent recon, right. OK, we’re not allowed a discrepancy on that. But there’s so much room for discrepancy.”

Army spokesman Lt. Col. Brandon Kelley said the service’s property inventory systems don’t readily track how many weapons have been lost or stolen. Army officials said that count could be found in criminal investigative records Army provided AP under yet another federal records request.

AP’s reading of these investigative records showed 231 lost or stolen rifles or handguns over the 2010s -- a clear undercount. Internal documents show just how much Army officials were downplaying the problem.

The AP obtained two memos covering 2013 through 2019 in which the Army tallied 1,300 stolen or lost rifles and handguns, based on criminal investigations and administrative incident reports. During the same period, the investigative records Kelley cited showed 62 lost or stolen rifles or handguns.

The broader Pentagon has minimized the problem.

Department of Defense spokeswoman Commander Candice Tresch said that the “historically the percentage of reported conventional weapons losses across the department is .001%.” Tresch would not elaborate on that statement, including to give context such as the timeframe or total number of weapons lost.